My voyage to see Ethel for Passover started with a sweaty taxi ride uptown to Penn Station. It was a post 80 degree-day and I was toting three kosher bottles of wine (Yarden cab blend. Not bad.). With few seconds to spare, I claimed a three-seater on the Long Beach branch of the LIRR as my own for the next 50 minutes.

In back of me, near the doors, stood a gentleman-- term loosely used. The man, who I would soon hear was 43-years -of -age, stared dreamily out the window to the Queens landscape. His phone rang. Lucky us. For the next eight minutes, in heavily accented Long Island-ese, he broadcast minute details of his last lazy hour. The car packed mostly with commuters who had otherwise spent their day at the office, had no choice but to hang on every word.

We learned that he would definitely see this girl again. She was a hot girl, yes the website lied a little. She was 40 pounds overweight, but still hot. And no, he told his friend, he did not go near her ‘box.’ He was careful to tell us all and leave almost nothing behind, no pun intended. Few details were poetic, most were prosaic.

I couldn't believe my good luck. I was never this close to this kind of monologue. The real thing. At work was an odd kind of whore/madonna mindset. He was boastful but clearly he felt virtuous. He knew he had his fun and helped her out. "Four guys, $800 a day, not bad, right?" he asked his friend.

Knowing I would use it in some piece of fiction or even an essay, I took notes. Fast. My fellow travelers were not nearly so eager to hear what keen bservation the man would next share with us, his new best friends. A woman near me barked back to him, “Hey! Hey! Can you tone it down? We don’t need to know this stuff, okay?”

After that do you really want to know about the Seder?

No. Let’s talk about this specious Natural Wine article. Afterall it reminds me in a strange way of the train incident.

Eric's comment that, “The author is a paid lobbyist for the producers of millions of hectoliters of wine from a specific region and thus by definition not objective,” might be true but the fact that Ned, the writer, seems to be a sommelier based in Tokyo, works against it. His prose flags how much of a threat wines made close nature poses to the world. I experienced quite a bit of this attitude in Champagne.

Though Ned (shockingly) tips his hat to Marcel LaPierre in a different article, he desperately wants to grind his axe against wines that shun hi-technology, additives and mostly sulphur. He seems as offended by the complexity of natural wines as I am by the Nabisco-esqueisms of conventionals. His reaction is that of cornered rat looking to bite the nearest pinkie. If he is an aspiring writer and not on the take, I’d love to see him banned from writing anything that passes as journalism. Such unsupported vitriol belongs in the domaine of the blogosphere home to both sane and insane. ( I know of what I speak—do you think I could get away with this outside of my own living room? Or yours?)

This fellow’s journalism was quite as ‘yellow,’ as much as the slime on the train's prattle was blue, especially in Ned’s sentence: “the extreme school, or ‘naturel’ producers eschewing responsible levels of sulphur dioxide.”

I would expect Ned's spin more from the Presidential campaign than from someone who passes as a ‘wine expert.’ Aren’t’ LOW or no levels of sulphur what is considered responsible? But here he is actually saying that using sulphur and ENOUGH sulphur is responsible.

People--and there are plenty--in the trade and journalism know nothing about wine and will believe his ink. That is dangerous.

Where Ned is correct is when he says in another article, “C’est bio, c’est bon.” There are plenty of substandard natural wines that wave the banner of love me I’m natural, when they are merely fuzzy, volatile experiments. But when the writer can’t even define his use of the term even with its modicum of truth it is easy to discount anything he said.

As far as the man on the train who paid his $200 for that hour, certainly getting more for his money than Spitzer did, told his friend in only slightly lower decibels, “Man, the whole car heard me, I gotta move into a different one. Oh my God, I’m so embarrassed. They heard everything.”